Is awareness of the ability to forget (or to remember) critical for demonstrating directed forgetting?

Directed forgetting magnitude increases when participants use forgetting strategies (Foster & Sahakyan, 2011). Furthermore, intentional forgetting ability may depend on memory monitoring if active engagement in the task is motivated by awareness of this ability. Accordingly, across four experiments, we investigated whether people judged that they could engage in intentional forgetting by measuring the sensitivity of list-level, or global, judgments of learning (JOLs). Participants studied two lists of words: List 1 was cued to be forgotten or remembered, but List 2 was always cued to be remembered. JOLs for both lists were collected under contexts of actual forget or remember cues (single-cue groups; Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or hypothetical remember and forget cues (contrasted group; Experiments 3 and 4). Sensitivity to directed forgetting costs was most evident when JOLs were made in close temporal proximity, suggesting that beliefs about costs emerge from contrasting the cues. Sensitivity to directed forgetting benefits depended on (a) List 2 study and (b) beneficial influence that forgetting List 1 had on List 2. Also, awareness of directed forgetting rarely coincided with actual directed forgetting effects. These results suggest that intentional forgetting does not depend on awareness of the ability to forget.